No kind of Hollywood movie is more beloved and more reviled than a sequel. People say they’re sick of rehashes of the same stories and characters; they bemoan the lack of originality in film and pine for the good ol’ days when the studios put more resources into creating new intellectual properties instead of repeatedly strip mining the same old ones.
That’s what they say. Then you go and look at the annual lists of box-office hits and you see, contrary to those complaints, that sequels almost always rate at or near the top. The four biggest movies of 2024 were sequels — Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Moana 2, and Despicable Me 4 — and five of top ten movies of 2023 were too. It happens every year, without fail.
Creatively, though, sequels fail all the time. Some of the biggest and most financially successful franchises in history have produced many of the most artistically bankrupt sequels. In the last 10 years alone there have been a slew of examples — so many, in fact, that ScreenCrush decided to compile this list of the ten worst of the last decade (plus ten more honorable mentions). These sorts of sequels are why people claim they hate sequels — even if they keep showing up to buy tickets to most of them anyway.
The 10 Worst Sequels of the Last 10 Years (2015-2024)
Audiences always push for sequels to their favorite movies. Sometimes, that backfires big time.
“Honorable” Mentions: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Glass, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Jurassic World, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Rambo: Last Blood, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Wonder Woman 1984, Zoolander 2.
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20 Sequels You Forgot Existed
These hit films all got sequels — although most were flops, and all are now forgotten.
